The Prevalence of Sex Offenders With Deviant Fantasies

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, and contemporary psychological theory have assigned a central role to deviant sexual fantasy in the genesis, maintenance, and treatment of sex offenders, but empirical studies to support that role are few in number. In this article, 201 male admitting sex offenders and controls were compared on the Clarke Sex History Questionnaire Fantasy Scales. Almost all respondents reported having fantasies of adult females, but only one third of the sex offenders reported having deviant fantasies. The frequencies of deviant fantasies for all groups tended to be low, and controls had more fantasies in general than sex offenders. Results were not influenced by response set, naive lying, age, education, or intelligence. The results suggest that the number of sex offenders reporting deviant fantasies is too low for fantasy to have etiological significance, and it only has limited utility in diagnosis and treatment in general.